The Tolstoy Estate

by Steven Conte

When they stepped outside the cold was a slap in the face. This was the land they wanted to conquer? Jesus Christ, in winter was it even habitable? Two of the corpsmen whose aid he’d enlisted brought Daria out of the house on a stretcher and lashed it to the sled. They covered her with blankets, and seconds later were dragging the sled in the direction of the gates, Bauer trudging wordlessly alongside Katerina in the rear. The cold was stupefying, his head as empty as a bell.

  As Katerina had promised, Tikhon Vassilyvich was waiting for them opposite the sentry post, snow in his beard and on a blanket-draped nag that pulled the sleigh. With the old man’s help they loaded Daria in the back, and Katerina climbed in beside her.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ Bauer said.

  ‘I should get her home,’ Katerina replied.

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ he asked her in a whisper.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tikhon Vassilyvich geed up the horse, and Bauer gripped the side rail of the sleigh. ‘Katerina, I love you,’ he said, and at last her eyes met his.

  ‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  The sleigh jerked and Bauer’s gloves slipped off the rail, then with a cry and a crack of the whip Tikhon Vassilyvich urged on his horse and the sleigh picked up speed and was gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He had just sat down at breakfast with a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal when Ehrlich arrived with a summons from Metz.

  ‘Now?’ Bauer asked him, and gazed down at the oatmeal, which his brain already had in his stomach.

  ‘Immediately,’ Ehrlich said. He looked pleased with himself, which put Bauer on guard and made him wonder again at the cause of Ehrlich’s malice. It seemed too late to ask.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, got up, took his mess tin to Pabst to keep warm and then followed Ehrlich out of the mess. Possibly there was nothing behind the corporal’s dislike for him, he thought – nothing specific, at least, nothing personal, his hostility more like a parasite that passes from one to another and pupates and squirms in its host.

  Standing in the corridor outside Metz’s study was Yuri Demchak, his expression calm. You idiot, Bauer thought, you bloody fool, but he said nothing and made his face inscrutable. Ehrlich ducked his head into the study and announced him, then ushered him into the study and withdrew.

  Metz was at his desk, pen in hand, his head bent over some documents. ‘Captain,’ he said without looking up. ‘Sit down, will you,’ he added, annotating – or pretending to. He looked up. Cleared his throat. ‘Your Hilfswilliger . . . no doubt you saw him in the hall?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What’s his name again?’

  ‘Demchak, sir. Yuri Demchak.’

  ‘This Demchak has come to me with a repulsive tale. He says Lieutenant Hirsch has made certain advances towards him. Of an improper nature. Advances of a sexual kind. He also says you refused to do anything about it.’

  Bauer hesitated. He’d told Demchak he would deny everything, but now couldn’t bring himself to lie. ‘Yes, sir, Private Demchak did mention this matter. But I acted on it straight away by confronting Lieutenant Hirsch with the claim.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He denied it.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. So this Demchak is a troublemaker?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, sir,’ he said, not yet ready to abandon Demchak entirely.

  ‘Then how would you put it? A foreigner impugning, in the foulest way, the honour of a German officer —’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding, sir. Lieutenant Hirsch was where he shouldn’t have been —’

  ‘The delousing station, wasn’t it? The sauna?’

  ‘Correct. They were in the sauna, and what I believe occurred is that Lieutenant Hirsch touched the corpsman accidentally.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  Bauer explained the sequence of events: Hirsch’s arrival and the gradual departure of Demchak’s comrades, leaving the two remaining men sitting close together.

  Metz scowled. ‘Sounds to me as if the Hiwi has a score to settle. Let’s get him back in here.’

  ‘Sir, this whole thing is a distraction. We have far better things to do.’

  Metz looked at him sternly. ‘I’ll be the one who decides that, thank you. In fact, it was very wrong of you not to bring the matter to me straight away.’

  ‘Because I thought it was trivial.’

  ‘Unit morale, Captain, should be the leader’s paramount consideration. There are two types of officer: those who make it their business to know what’s going on in the ranks and those who don’t. Now, let’s have this Hiwi in again, shall we. Ehrlich!’

  Ehrlich reappeared and Metz told him to bring Demchak back in. Demchak reappeared, marched to Metz’s desk and came to attention.

  Metz said, ‘I’ve been speaking with Captain Bauer about the matter you raised. I think you’re lying.’ Demchak’s normally rigid eyebrows twitched. ‘The captain here merely thinks you’re mistaken.’

  ‘Sir, I’m not lying,’ Demchak said. ‘And I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘So tell me, what did happen? The details. This is your chance to tell the truth.’

  Demchak drew himself even more rigidly to attention and repeated his story, its facts unchanged from the version he’d told three days earlier but the phrasing somewhat different, a combination that to Bauer rather enhanced its credibility.

  ‘And was the lieutenant aroused when this happened?’ Metz asked.

  Bauer looked at him sharply, unsure he’d heard correctly. Demchak, too, looked disconcerted. ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Good grief, man. Was he erect?’

  ‘Well, no, sir, not really.’

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘He was, I would say, sir, semi-erect.’

  ‘And were you? Erect, I mean?’

  ‘No!’ he said, shocked into raising his voice.

  ‘And what else do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. That is, nothing apart from what I told the captain yesterday: that I have no axe to grind against the lieutenant, no reason to make any of this up. My only concern is with the moral health of the battalion.’

  Metz harrumphed then said, ‘We’ll see about that. You can go back to your duties. On your way out tell Ehrlich to fetch Lieutenant Hirsch.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Demchak said, saluted and left the room.

  ‘Forgive me, sir,’ Bauer said, ‘but this is all a waste of time. Private Demchak says one thing, Lieutenant Hirsch another. It’s one man’s word against another, and questioning Hirsch again is unlikely to get us closer to the truth.’

  ‘There you go again with your counsel of despair: it can’t be done, it’s pointless, we shouldn’t bother to try. Well, as it happens, I don’t regard it as one man’s word against another. Hirsch is a comrade. The Hiwi isn’t. He’ll have to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘A POW camp, I should think. Where else?’

  ‘Sir, he’s in German uniform, and even if we could find him a Soviet one he might be found out by his fellow prisoners and killed. Can I suggest another option?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘If the incident was an honest misunderstanding, it follows that sacrificing Demchak would be a mistake. He’s an outstanding operating assistant. Let’s not waste those skills. Let’s separate these men by transferring one of them out of the unit. As you know I’ve been unhappy with Hirsch as my anaesthetist —’

  ‘No, absolutely not,’ Metz said. ‘I won’t have Hirsch suffer on account of the allegations of a Hiwi.’

  ‘Even if we end up with a better anaesthetist?’

  ‘That matter is closed. Apart from anything else I would need to find a new dentist.’

  ‘Very well, then transfer Demchak, if not to a medical unit then to a fighting one. God knows it’s time we put Hiwi volunteers under arms. Demchak in particular hates the Reds.’

  There was a knock on the door, and Metz called out, inviting wh
oever it was to come inside. It was Ehrlich. ‘Lieutenant Hirsch to see you, sir.’

  ‘Send him in.’

  Hirsch entered, looking nervous. Nothing unusual in that, and to set him at ease Bauer caught his eye and smiled. Unlike Demchak, who’d had to stand, Hirsch was offered a chair.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ Metz said, ‘I’ve asked you here to discuss this nasty business with the Hiwi. I believe that Captain Bauer here has raised the matter with you?’

  ‘He has, sir,’ Hirsch said, and sent Bauer a look of reproach.

  ‘It’s an outrageous claim, of course,’ Metz said, ‘the kind of thing that could only come from a diseased imagination. You deny it, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir,’ Hirsch said with impressive conviction, then rather spoiled it by adding another yes.

  ‘Good,’ Metz said. ‘Any idea why he might have made something like that up? Does he hold a grudge against you?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, sir.’

  ‘Just malice, then. Stirring up trouble. I told you so, Bauer. So much for your dewy-eyed postulations. When the next POW column goes past, our Hiwi will be joining it. Till then I’ll have Ritter put him under lock and key.’

  ‘Sir, as I said, I believe you’re making a mistake,’ Bauer said.

  ‘I bet Hirsch here doesn’t see it that way. Do you, Lieutenant?’

  Hirsch looked confused. ‘POW column? You’re sending him away?’

  ‘He’s lucky I’m not having him shot,’ Metz said.

  Hirsch’s gaze darted from one to the other.

  ‘What is it?’ Metz said.

  ‘It’s just that I agree with the captain. You’re making a mistake.’

  ‘Oh? Why is that?’

  Hirsch looked down and then up again. ‘Because Yuri is telling the truth.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Bauer said. ‘Just shut up, Volker.’

  ‘It’s all right, sir,’ Hirsch said, standing up. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’ Calmly he unbuttoned his holster, pulled out his pistol and held it to his head.

  ‘Don’t!’ Bauer yelled, and leaped out of his chair. The shot punched Hirsch sideways, spraying matter from his head. Too late Bauer covered his ears.

  ‘Scheisse!’ Metz screamed. ‘Shit and fuck it all to hell!’

  Bauer squatted beside Hirsch’s body. He was definitely dead. A chunk of his left skull had gone, and along with it much of his brain.

  ‘Ehrlich!’ Metz cried, but Ehrlich was already there, and when Metz spoke again his voice was changed, strangely calm. ‘Clean it up, will you, Corporal.’ From the corridor came the sound of men running; a sentry strode into the room, and in the doorway several others appeared, among them Drexel, Zöllner and Waldo Pabst. Ignoring their presence, Metz sat down, dragged his paperwork towards him, picked up his pen and started marking the pages.

  ‘Sir?’ Ehrlich said.

  ‘Clean it up.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Of course he’s dead. Get him out of here. And mop the damn floor.’ He glanced up and saw the onlookers. ‘Get out, the lot of you!’ he yelled, suddenly furious again. ‘To work, to work. What do you think this is, a zoo?’ The men in the doorway backed away, but slowly, some hesitating in the corridor. ‘The lot of you! You too, Captain, out,’ he shouted, and Bauer made for the door. To the sentry Metz shrieked, ‘Not you, damn it! Give the corporal a hand.’

  Bauer reached the doorway and looked back inside just as Ehrlich and the sentry raised the body by its armpits and ankles, causing more bone and brain tissue to tumble to the floor. Where the head had lain, a Rorschach puddle of blood.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Stanford, California

  3 January 1969

  Dear Paul,

  How tenacious you are! It’s becoming clearer to me how you survived the Gulag. No, I don’t believe anyone would want to publish my novels in translation. Why would they? Forty-five years on, and despite your kind comments about them, their main value is not literary but sociological and historical, and anyone with those interests can read them in Russian. Oh, and by the way, when I say that your comments were ‘kind’ I also mean they were mentally deranged. You think Europa, 1975 is reminiscent of Kafka? In the same way, I suppose, that Walt Disney’s Bambi is reminiscent of . . . I don’t know, Battleship Potemkin? Good God, Paul, in a single sentence you have shattered my faith in your critical faculties.

  Anyway, who really cares about novels any more? Outside of the Soviet Union and its vassal states, I mean, where the authorities have done wonders for the prestige of good writing by banning it. In contrast, the more time I spend in the West the more I realise that the visual media are destined (and not only in the West) to eclipse the novel as the premier method of telling stories. This isn’t only a matter of technology but also of talent. A generation ago an ambitious and reasonably gifted man like my son would have gone into publishing rather than television; and what is true of an ancillary worker like Marlen is also true of the primary producers. If a Tolstoy were born today, would he choose to become a writer? Of course not. Tolstoy aimed for cultural pre-eminence, and any writer seeking that today would turn to film. Actually, Tolstoy’s ego was so gargantuan that even the global fame he got from writing wasn’t enough for him, which is why in later life he had to establish himself as a latter-day Buddha. His thinking had an enormous effect on Gandhi, you know, and even now there are Tolstoyan communities dotted about, naturally enough including here in California (where I am participating in the first of a series of events that will take place around the world this year to celebrate the centenary of War and Peace).

  To be clear, I’m not saying that the novel as a form will disappear, any more than poetry has disappeared since it lost its status as the most prestigious branch of literature. But its importance will fade. Everything fades, I suppose, certainly everything made by human hands, and yet I can’t help feeling bereft to witness this diminution of the novel, which for all its inadequacies has trained us to see the world from others’ points of view. To borrow a Stalinist idiom, the novel is a machine, a noisy, violent thing whose product, oddly enough, is often human understanding, perhaps even a kind of love. I daresay some might look at the last one hundred years and say, ‘Nonsense, what love?’, but if so they are naive because the terrifying truth is that it could have been worse. Hitler could have won. Kennedy and Khrushchev could have blown us all to hell. And who knows what other horrors we’ve evaded because someone, or someone’s teacher, or someone’s mother or grandfather, once put down a novel and thought, ‘My God, I am like that stranger’ or ‘That stranger is like me’ or even ‘That stranger is utterly different from me, and yet how understandable his hopes and longings are.’ And in the future, as fewer and fewer people use these engines of empathy, what horrors will we not avoid?

  Lately I’ve had warmer feelings towards Natasha Rostova. Your letter, you see, has sent me back to my work on Tolstoy’s plotting, and in turn back to War and Peace, in which I believe I have discovered something new about Natasha’s near elopement with the cad Kuragin – new to me, that is – making me think of her with more compassion. Natasha’s archetypal element would of course be Air, since by nature she is sunny, spirited, light-hearted and, let’s face it, at times more than a little empty-headed. Certainly I’ve always regarded her failure to wait a single year for Prince Andrei as a demonstration of her fundamental lack of seriousness, but in this recent reading I’ve noticed the severity of the lust she endures quite literally at Kuragin’s hands. Her primary emotion during this episode is not passion but dread. The poor thing is twenty, has believed herself to be on the verge of marriage, and now here she is starved not so much of love but of sex. To put it another way, the airiness of her nature has been driven out, not by Fire – the fire of passion, the fire of love – but by Earth, the dank and pungent urges of fecundity, so closely related to the death imperative. And I like her much better this way, as a corporeal being, human not sprite. What’s strange
is that I didn’t notice these urges in Natasha when I was a younger woman and had them myself. Was I unusually innocent, or was our generation not equipped to notice such things? Is it possible, after all, that I have discovered something new, something hidden to previous readers – possibly even to the author himself? Picture me at my desk now, smiling at my own presumption. I daresay there have been plenty of readers less innocent than I who noticed Natasha’s lust, and that rogue Tolstoy certainly knew what he was up to – his grubby fingerprints are all over the affair.

  Thank you for the information about the various fates of your wartime comrades. How pleasing that Hermann Molineux managed to evade the Red Army and all it threw at him and instead ate and drank himself to death; if ever there was a man unfit to die tragically it was he. Mind you, news of the tragic death of your Major Weidemann left me cold, I’m afraid – no doubt because this was the effect he had on me in life. As for Zöllner, I had to struggle to remember him. He was absurdly handsome, was he not, in that slightly witless, Nordic way? (Blond eyebrows – what on earth is the point of them?) To hear he had been killed did affect me, however, if in a rather abstract way: the beauty of youth cut down, et cetera, et cetera. Do I sound unfeeling? If so, I apologise. It’s just that so many people died. Believe me, if I could I’d mourn them all, and in the unlikely event that I see out the twentieth century I will pause as the sun sets on its final day and think of its myriad dead.

  Now to the matter of you wanting to meet me in person, which like your evaluation of my second novel makes me wonder about your judgement, Paul, if not your sanity. No, you simpleton, they wouldn’t let us have dinner alone together; your fantasy press conference would be followed by some vulgar banquet attended by KGB agents and minor Party dignitaries. And what could you hope to gain from that? A further meeting? And then what? Are you trying to woo me, Paul Bauer? If so, the odds are stacked against you, I’m afraid – not only due to the geopolitics but also because I’ve turned into a cantankerous old cow. Haven’t I conveyed that to you yet? Or are your motives carnal, is that it? If you’re thinking along those lines you should know I’m now a wreck of a woman, and that if I tried to ravish you as I did at Yasnaya Polyana you would likely panic and defenestrate yourself.